It is the season: Wolves media day precedes Tuesday's training-camp start

The Wolves held their annual media day this afternoon at Target Center before heading to Mankato late this afternoon.

They will practice there once a day -- long, 3 to 4 hour practices, though -- before returning from Glen Taylor's home town on Friday afternoon.

I'll have a long Rick Adelman story and a chunky notebook up on the Strib site later this evening, but for now some impressions:

* Lean and mean seems to be the theme this year.

Kevin Love looks great. He claimed he didn't know his weight and wouldn't say what his body fat was down to, but he looks like the best shape of his career.

Derrick Williams looked almost skinny and said he feels that way. He said he weighs 235 pounds after playing at 250 last season and 245 in college at Arizona.

He lost that weight so he's better suited to play small forward.

"A little bit," he said when asked if he feels skinny. "Just different. I'm used to be being bigger."

Rookie Shabazz Muhammad said he's lost between 10 and 15 pounds, thanks to a new workout regimen and better eating habits.

Alexey Shved said he weighs the same as last year, but is stronger.

"I make muscles," he said.

J.J Barea said he is in one of the best shapes of his life as well.

* Muhammad said he wrote a letter to Flip Saunders and Taylor after he got sent home on the first day of the league's rookie symposium for having a woman in his room and said he vowed that it won;'t happen again.

* Flip has said the team might give Shved, Barea and Ricky Rubio time off here in camp and during the preseason schedule because they played in August and September with their national teams. But Rubio wasn't having any of that. He said he's 100 percent part of team and plans to do everything his teammates do.

* Love made it clear during his media session that he has little interest in talking about his lost season last year or about gone David Kahn: Last year is last year is the theme he repeated.

* Good quote from Corey Brewer about his return to the Wolves. “I like Minnesota. We weren’t winning too much when I was here but I wasn’t too good when I was here, either.”

* Chase Budinger was seen by Dr. James Andrews in Alabama but the team said it had no update because all the results weren't back. There's a chance he could see Rubio's surgeon in Vail as well.

* The Wolves formally added A.J. Price to the training-camp roster Monday to bring the number to 18 players for camp.

* When asked what his starting lineup is, Adelman said there's no question about four spots -- Rubio, Kevin Martin, Love and Nikole Pekovic, of course -- and said Brewer likely is the starting small forward now that Budinger is injured again because Brewer has played in the league for six years and done it before.

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Jerry Zgoda missed the entire Kevin Garnett era, but he's back covering the Timberwolves after working the beat for their first four seasons two decades ago. In between, he covered a bit of everything: Gopher men's and women's basketball and NCAA athletics, golf, outdoor recreation, sports media and a little Vikings and Twins.